I am fresh from my first ever Couchsurfing experience and it was pretty amazing. I stayed with a local girl in Kaili, a small city that I am really impressed with. She’s part of the local minority Miao people and has started her own business teaching English to local kids. She and her twin sister have made names for themselves by teaching themselves English after having left school at age 14. I stayed in her apartment she shares with her father and his girlfriend and even sat in on her English class one morning.

The night I arrived I found myself out at a local nightclub which was an experience complete with drinking beer in shots and a flamethrowing bartender. The following day we headed off with some of her friends to an area a bit out of town where locals swim in the river, drink beer, have BBQs and play mahjong and cards. It was truly the sort of place I never would have discovered for myself and I loved every minute of it.

So I am definitely a fan of Couchsurfing but I never would have expected not to be. The only downside is that it’s pretty much impossible to get work done if your host is good enough to show you around. If you get a host who might be busy with work of their own then you might be able to spend your days getting things done.

But then again, for me the whole point of Couchsurfing is to immerse yourself in the local culture and hiding yourself away on your computer sort of defeats the purpose so work be damned! At least until the next stop.

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I spent the past few days travelling with a Chinese girl who is pretty interested in the internet and SEO stuff. She’s really interested in what I’m doing and spent a lot of time asking me questions about my websites.

It was really interesring for me to be able to get a glimpse into the world of the internet in China. She was amazed that people buy so many things online, especially things like insurance. She said her boyfriend had had an idea to set up a car rental website because, at the moment, nothing like this exists in China. She also told me that most websites are very commercial and that information sites with advertising don’t really seem to exist.

She seemed pretty switched on about the internet so I think she knows what she’s talking about. It’s an exciting thing to think that the Chinese internet market might not be at the same stage as the Western world. If China is a bit behind, think of all of the opportunities there must be out there!

It’s exciting stuff but if, in fact, the net in China still has lots of room for development, I think gtting on board soon will make a lot of people a lot of money. Does anyone know anything about the state of the internet in China? Are there still opportunities here that us web marketers could only dream of having in the West?

I think it’s worth investigating so any of you out there with internet savvy Chinese friends might want to start looking for partners.

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I’m in a little village whose name I can’t remember in a provence whose name I can’t even attempt to spell and I don’t have a guidebook with me at the moment to be able to fill in the blanks. One name I do remember though is the village I spent the past three nights it. It’s called Dazhai and is located amongst the Dragon’s Backbone Rice Terraces. It’s a pretty awesome place with friendly people who are part of a minority group I never did get the name of. But the women have super long hair and wear it sort of wrapped around their heads like a hat. Combine that with their pink outfits, wicker baskets on their backs, and towering rice terraces as a backdrop and you’ve got a pretty cool place to chill out for a few days.

My hotel was an hours hike from where the bus dropped me off. I Had spent 6 hours on buses by that point and when I saw where I was supposed to be hiking to, I nearly aborted the mission and stayed in a closer hotel. But the trek was worth it, the views were amazing, and they even had internet way up there! I was amazed. Plus they had a festival today and I managed to get some serious photgraphy practice in. I love taking portrait shots but feel bad about getting all up in people’s faces. Well festvals are pretty much a free for all and I think I got some good shots that I’ll post when I get a chance. Improving my abismal photography skills is on my list for sure.

So now I’m in a new village - I think it’s called Changyang but don’t quote me on that - and the hostel has a fast connection and the hugest monitor I have ever seen in my life. Unfortunately there’s no wifi and even worse, there’s nobody else here! That always happens to me and it’s annoying I tell you. I’m hoping to head off to the provence up north to a city called Kaili to try couchsurfing for the first time but I’ve heard that the roads might be blocked due to landslides. I think the gods are against me when it comes to couchsurfing but I’ll try my best to get there.

So getting to the point of this post… internet is everywhere these days and will only continue to spread around. It’s starting to be more of a shock when a place doesn’t have the internet than when it does and that’s good news for us nomads.

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A month ago I decided to run a little test and see what kind of an impact commenting on other blogs would have on Nerdy Nomad. I was even keeping track of how many comments I had left and on which blogs but I seem to have lost that file somewhere into the abyss that is my disorganised hard drive.

Here are the results. I know you can hardly wait.

• RSS Subscribers - My feed subscribers rose from 129 to 158, a jump of 29 people. Hello new people! It took me ten months to get to 129 so I’m really happy to see it jump by so much in a single month.
• 45n5 Top 100 Blogs List - I jumped up 31 places on this list from 234 to 205. The list uses Page Rank, Alexa and Technorati stats to come up with some sort of system of rating blogs. I’m not sure how meaningful it is but I’m pretty competitive and something like this is a good motivator for me.
• Comments - I went from a measly 55 comments last month to 148 in June. This could be attributed to me having made more blog posts in June than in May, but a jump this big has got to have more behind it that just that. There have been lots of new faces and I know that many have found Nerdy Nomad through my comments on other blogs. They’ve told me so.
• Traffic - My visitor numbers rose from 42 to 58 uniques per day and from 85 to 140 page views per day. This seems to be a pretty big leap forwad too. I am guessing that my page view rose more because people new to my blog spent some time sifting through old posts which is cool. It’s always nice when long forgotten blog posts get a bit of reader love.

Obviously any number of factors could have had an effect on my improved stats but I have to think that leaving more comments and getting my name out there has been a large factor. Things have actually jumped up by a lot more than I expected. But stats aside, becoming more active in the blogging community has been rewarding in a lot of ways. It’s a great way to meet to people, exchange ideas, find new blogs and it’s even better when more and more new people find you.

As great as I think commenting on other blogs is, I doubt I’ll be able to devote much time to it in July. I might even not leave a single comment on another blog and see how that effects my numbers. Ya, let’s do that. So in July, no comments from me. This might be a stupid move and all of my hard work might go down the drain, but I’m curious to see what happens.

So are you guys surprised with the results or are they pretty much what you would have expected? I’m happy with my little experiment but lets see what July has in store.

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I’m travelling at the moment so posts to Nerdy Nomad might be a bit sparse in July and I figured I should do my best to at least start off well with my earnings report for June. I’m up from last month and just a bit short of the $2000 mark. I came in at $1970 for June and, once again, I’m pretty happy about it.

Earnings breakdown:

• Google Adsense - $348 - This was the first month that Adsense fell in a long time. It dropped about $50 from May and I think Google’s mysterious smart pricing is to blame. My London site was the main victim and for a couple of weeks I was only earning a few cents per click on that site. I think things are back on track now though.
• Affiliate Sales - $1182 - Same old story with affiliates sales. The usual star performer is still doing well but everything else is pulling up the rear. I sold some van insurance for $60 with Clix Galore, but that’s about it.
• Linkworth & Text Link Ads - $150 - Text Link Ads is on the decline. dropping from $145 in May to about $125 this month. I think that’s due to Travoholic.com falling from PR4 to PR3. I’m not too worried about this as it’s relatively not that big of a drop in income.
• Private Link Sales - $290 - It was a pretty bad month for link sales but I didn’t make any effort to sell them, so I can’t really complain. I had $30 worth of subscription links and a sale for $260 to a company selling travel insurance. the reason I got so much out of them is because I sold the link using UK prices and they went for it. Sweet!

I’m annoyed that I didn’t get the websites I was working on finished, but I’m hoping I can squeeze some work in over the coming weeks and have them finished before August which will be a complete write off as far as doing work goes. I had expected June to be a huge month because I thought I had $1100 in link sales lined up. It turns out that those might not come through until July, if at all, so the massive month I was expecting is just average.

July and August could potentially be writeoffs for productivity. I will try to work while I’m travelling but if I dont have wifi I might not get much done. August will certainly be work-free as I’ll have friends to host and will be filling my time with watching table tennis and weightlifting, among other things. It’ll be interesting to see if my earnings are effected. Hopefully I’ll get a nice surprise and not see any drop.

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